[brudgers]

Some random remarks:

1. Working as a software engineer in healthcare and improving the state of patient data are two different goals. One is technical and vocational and the other is largely a matter of policy and economics and outside the scope of working as a software engineer in healthcare.

2. Engineering is usually a matter of combining existing systems. Detailed academic knowledge of databases is very interesting and mostly irrelevant to engineering an information system that contains databases because there are lots of good databases and because what makes one or the other better is nature of the problem to which they are applied.

3. The same is true for encryption and security. It's a matter of picking tools and/or hiring experts. It's not robustly implementing one's own elliptic curves.

4. There's nothing wrong with pursuing a CS degree for the sake of learning. Just realize that successful engineering is a matter of collaboration and "knowing which table to look at."